


heroes get remembered

by sonofahurricane



Series: usually you're dead to get your own museum [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, museum studies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-12
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 03:09:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2757311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonofahurricane/pseuds/sonofahurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Winter Soldier, Steve realizes he has to take care of some things with the Smithsonian exhibit. Sequel to 'empty and aching and i don't know why', takes places shortly after CA:TWS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heroes get remembered

He comes back to her office after DC is nearly torn apart.

Captain Rogers--she's supposed to call him that, everything formal, the way it should be in the professional world of exhibit production--looks haggard, like he maybe hasn't slept in a few days. Cath can't exactly blame him--given how wrecked the city was, still is in most places, she figures that, in saving it, he was hurt pretty badly too. There was something on the news--news flashes on a flickering screen--but her apartment lost power early into the attack, and she stayed at the laundromat instead, with her vet neighbor looking wide-eyed and panicked the entire time, and her elderly landlady trying and failing to make the crank radio work.

Thankfully most of the Smithsonians remained untouched. The destruction was centered around places of national defense, not national education, the same way the budget seems to float. That’s a bitter thought, and Cath silently chides herself for thinking it on her way into work that morning. She still has a job and a place to work and for the most part, it sounds like, while HYDRA had a hand in the appointment of some of the heads, the Smithsonian is not the hot-bed of neo-neo-Nazi thought that the top defense echelons seemed to be.

Which brings her back to Captain Rogers, sitting, the same way he had sat the morning after their first meeting, his arm in a sling pressed close to his chest and bags under his eyes. His face looks puffy, with the hint that it had probably looked much worse just a few days ago. She knows a little bit about the serum from her work on the museum--isn't a scientist, by any means, but knows enough to know how badly he must have been hurt initially to warrant how stiff and achy he looks today. He doesn't meet her gaze when she first enters the room, but looks up at her after she clears her throat and makes her approach obvious. There's something in his face that reminds her of her neighbor, and it doesn't fade away the way you might expect. His bruised jaw is set firmly, and his eyes are unblinking and serious.

"Captain Rogers?" she asks hesitantly, because she doesn't know what else to say to him.

"Ms. Denall," he says, then tries to rise from his seat, wincing as his arm shifts and his legs almost audibly creak. "I hate to bother you, but I need to speak with someone about the visit, and I heard that Dr. Jenkins is out of town this week-"

"Um, yes, absolutely," she digs around in her purse for her keys, finds them and manages to get it unlocked in much less time than the first time he just showed up at her office. "Come in, come in. Can I get you anything? Tea, hot water, anything like that?" She rushes into her office and practically dumps her bag behind her desk, clearing off the work from last night--going through visitor surveys from the updated Captain America exhibit--in one swift motion and heading back to the work room to get him whatever hot drink he desired.

"Please," Steve lowered himself into the chair opposite her desk heavily, then held up an arm to stop her from leaving the room. "If you could. I just need to speak with you quickly, and then I'll be out of your hair."

"It's really no problem- you can drop in any time, I'd love--" she cuts herself off based on the distant look on his face, like her words aren't even registering any more, and she instead closes the door to her office and takes a seat at her desk. "What can I help you with today, Captain Rogers?" she asks, leaning across her desk and trying to look simultaneously open and professional.

He comes back to her slowly, glances out the window and at her shut office door before leaning in, resting his elbows on his knees. "There's going to be- some things," he says, stumbling over his words. "Maybe. I'm not sure how much the press is going to know, how much they're going to be able to say, but I need a promise--I need a promise from you."

Cath nods slowly, trying to parse exactly what it could be he was dancing around. She has a standard of responsibility to the public, and she has to uphold it in all cases, regardless of her relationship--however ridiculous and probably one sided it is--with Captain Rogers. But he surely knows this, or guesses it about her. He reads people well, she knows that much about him, and he wouldn't ask her to do this if it wasn't important to him. "I... can try," she finally says. "I have work obligations--I'm sure you're aware. But I will do my best to uphold whatever it is you ask of me."

He nods, like he is processing what exactly the implications of her comment are. Cath feels a pang of regret--he obviously came to her with some expectation, with some sense of understanding he felt they had. She of all people doesn’t want to let Captain America down, but the intensity in his face, borderline desperation colored with exhaustion, almost scares her. She feels pulled in two directions--but the pull of the Smithsonian is stronger than the pull of a man, no, a _symbol_ , from seventy years ago. Maybe those folks who stood up at SHIELD feel differently, but Cath knows where she has always stood. It’s in his hands now, and if he decides to walk out of her office without another word, well, disappointing Captain America is about a good a story as any. She imagines telling it to her family at Christmas, on her parents’ farm in Vermont: “And then he looked at me like I had personally installed HYDRA in all the higher echelons of government, and he left.”

He doesn’t look at her like that, though. He’s quiet for a long time, his eyes back to scanning the streets outside her window. She presses her lips together, knows in the back of her mind she’s supposed to be doing _work_ \--that she’s lucky to be here today, when most of the government is still on unofficial furlough to take time to respond to the chaos. And yet she’s here at the office, is supposed to be combing through visitor surveys from the Commandos and Cap exhibit--her own private name, obviously, and she’s always very careful to never mention it in front of Dr. Jenkins or, god forbid, the few times she’s come face to face with Captain Rogers himself. While he sits there in silence, Cath goes to the filing cabinet full of the design and redesign paperwork and gets out the visitor surveys they’ve collected in the year and change since the redesign opened. She opens the folder and tries to make her eyes focus, but Captain Rogers is breathing deeply, his arm moving along with his chest, and it’s sort of distracting, being caught between being a good customer service representative for the museum and between getting the work done that she was specifically brought in to do.

“The audio,” Rogers says suddenly, catching Cath so off-guard that she practically jumps from her seat. Instead she gasps a little bit, hopefully inaudibly (‘looking like a fool in front of Captain America’ is already a story she tells, that won’t impress anyone at Christmas) and looks up at him. He’s still staring out the window, his body far too rigid to actually be relaxed, and she’s not even sure for a second there if he’s addressing her.

“Excuse me?” she asks, because she’s not sure that she heard him correctly. Or what the hell it is he’s saying, and why he’s saying.

Rogers clears his throat, adjusts his position in the chair so he can actually look at her. Cath can’t help but watch the tiny grimace as his movement jars his arm, and she notices again that he looks exhausted. She wonders if he’s gotten any real rest since he saved the country, _again_.

“The audio. In the exhibit.” He nods to indicate the stack of papers on her desk, the visitor surveys. “I never got to fill one out, but, uh, the audio, it’s--it’s overwhelming for some people. It can be, if you have anxiety. There’s a lot of text and a lot of audio and it’s an information overload, and when you’re surrounded by all the people and the text and the audio, it’s overwhelming. It makes--can make--people anxious.”

Cath’s not entirely sure what she’s hearing. “You came to my office to file a complaint?” she asks, not because she’s annoyed with him--she knew the multimedia could be a problem, but she was worried about relying on the text so much would exclude those who couldn’t read at the reading level at which Dr. Jenkins seemed to demand, and it was a quick fix.

“And there’s no--there’s no place to sit in the exhibit,” he continues, like he doesn’t even hear her question. “There are a lot of folks who come through who have issues walking--young people, too, not just old ones, and veterans, disabled folk. They have to go all the way out of the exhibit to take a breather, and it doesn’t seem right, pushing them on through like that. They should be able to sit where _they_ wanna sit, where they can see at least some of the exhibit, and where they can have space to themselves if they get overwhelmed.”

Cath wonders quietly if he’s been reading up on ADA regulations or something, if he’s learned quite a bit about modern accessibility from that vet who used to run support groups, the new hero, Wilson--Sam Wilson. “Okay,” she says, and digs at the bottom of the pile of papers to find a blank one--her original copy, but she can run over on her lunch hour and get a clean one, or hell, just print another one off. “Do you want to fill this out for me, and I can make sure those issues get addressed?”

“You gotta look out for the ones with anxiety issues, with mobility issues, with PTSD,” Rogers says, and he’s definitely looking through her at this point. “The people who visit the exhibit, you don’t know their story, you have to plan for everything.”

She stares at him blankly. This is clearly about so, so much more than the exhibit, and she feels so far out of her depth. It’s like they’re swimming and he’s drowning and clinging to her, and all she can do is tread enough water for the both of them. “Captain Rogers,” she says, tries to ground them both in this huge thing. “What is it you came into my office today to talk to me about?”

He looks up at her, his eyes unwavering, cold and steely, like a sinking anchor. “You’ve heard about the Winter Soldier,” he says.  

Now that Cath can’t have escaped. NPR--another government organization blessedly HYDRA-free, apparently--reported about him this morning, about the myth of the Winter Soldier. They had some conspiracy theorist on, talking about--frankly Cath can’t even remember, just remembers the contempt barely passing for interest that the normally-respectful Nina Totenberg visibly expressed (audibly expressed?) as she asked questions. “He’s responsible for a lot of the destruction of the city,” she says, and then quickly adds “they’re saying,” when Captain Rogers visibly shudders.

“HYDRA is responsible for the destruction of the city,” he corrects her sharply, and she nods, lowers her eyes back to down to the paperwork on her desk. “The Winter Soldier--” he stops, trails off, searches his hands for a way to continue. “There’s also some incorrect information in your exhibit.”

Cath actually has to bite her tongue. In an ideal world, the exhibit is actually _theirs_ , as she put it together using all of his information, but he has some ownership of it too--it’s _his_ story and has he already forgotten that he helped her tell it? Cath wonders idly if that’s a chapter she should include in her dissertation, about ownership of exhibits and to whom does an exhibit truly belong--its consumers, its creators, or those who it’s about? But museum theory aside, if there’s incorrect information, it needs to be fixed as soon as possible. “Okay,” she says, digs in another desk drawer for a legal pad, and grabs up her pen.

“Bucky Barnes didn’t die in 1944.” For all that Captain America is solidly but politely opposed to Hiroshima, and even to Dresden when she brought it up, he seems to have no qualms about dropping bombs of his own. Cath blinks, once, twice, tries to process what exactly he’s saying.

“With all due respect, Captain Rogers,” she starts, her voice wobbling a little bit.

“Please, Ms. Denall, you can call me Steve.”

_Only if you call me Cath like I asked you so long ago_ , she thinks, but doesn’t have the wherewithal to go after him about it, is still working through her factual error that can’t have been an error. “You- you saw Sergeant Barnes-”

“I saw him fall,” Captain Rogers--Steve--interrupts her again. “I didn’t see him die.”

Cath rubs her head, draws a box on her notepad, writes ‘Barnes - not dead in ‘44’ down, because that’s what she’s taking notes for, after all, to correct the errors. “Can I ask how you know this? They don’t really let you change this kind of information on _Wikipedia_ any more, much less in a museum exhibit funded in part by the federal government, unless that exhibit is the National Women’s History Museum.” She bites off the rest of her sentence--no need to get Steve Rogers wrapped up in _another_ museum controversy. He’s here to save America, not America’s museums.

And that sets off something _else_ , because he’s back to staring out the window, clamped down, and she goes back to doodling on her sheet, drawing a pyramid next to her box. She writes ‘Winter Soldier’ down in flowy handwriting, then in block text, then in her neatest print, before it all falls into place.

“Barnes?” she asks, and Steve actually flinches in front of her, his jaw and neck muscles tightening, his hands gripping the arms of the chair he’s rigidly sitting in. She takes that as a yes, then, because Steve Rogers wouldn’t react that way for anything less. “How can you be so sure?”

“I _know_ him,” he says, and it’s more to the window than to her. The arms on the chair creak, and he flattens his hands out to palms, suddenly aware of the fact that he could theoretically destroy it--more Hulk than Captain America.

This is what the Smithsonian gets for buying cheap furniture for its offices and then allowing superheroes to sit in them. This is what the Smithsonian gets for building exhibits about the living, for memorializing what is still ongoing. Cath rubs her head, then puts both hands flat on her desk. “Steve,” she says slowly, “what you’re telling me is that Sergeant Barnes _seemed_ to die in 1944, but in fact he was alive and-- involved in HYDRA in some way?”

Steve flinches again, and it takes every ounce of professionalism Cath has to not sigh heavily. This is complicated--she knows this. Every exhibit is complicated. But she would like to hear that the information in the exhibit is _incomplete_ , not _wrong_. She would like the information to not involve a _terrorist_ who was currently on the run. She would like--a very small wish, but one that persists in her head, watching him flinch and move, shift in the chair, look out the window like he expects the Winter Soldier to show up--if maybe everyone this exhibit tried to represent was dead. Not that Steve was dead, not that specifically, but sometimes she wishes that history would fade away like the general public loves to think it does.

“Steve,” she starts again, because maybe she can erase that last sentence that obviously hurt. “What would you like me to do?”

Steve deeply exhales, moves his eyes from the window to his feet, and the fact that he doesn’t meet her eyes, won’t meet her eyes, seemingly can’t meet her eyes, deeply troubles her. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice low. “But something--” he cuts himself off again. “He doesn’t remember… much. At all.” He inhales, winces, moves his arm in the sling. “He doesn’t remember who he is, but he knows his name now. He knows his name.” He trails off and relaxes back against the chair, _finally_ looks at her. “Cath,” he says, measured, carefully, finally getting down to the point. “He deserves to have someone he knows explain everything.”

Cath nods slowly, trying to give herself time to put the pieces together, because sometimes Steve just assumes she knows everything. She knows a lot, she’ll give herself that much credit--she’s worked on this exhibit long enough to know most of it, probably--but she isn’t privy to every single one of Captain Rogers’s memories, nor does she want to be. Which is not something she ever thought she’d be saying, as a museum curator, but here she is. “He deserves to have _you_ explain everything,” she fills in for him. “But… there’s a problem.”

“He knows his name,” Steve repeats, looking unsure of himself. “But I think- I think that’s it. I don’t think he remembers most of it. He barely remembers me. But he knows his name, and he’s gonna want to know more.”

Oh. Oh dear. “He’s… going to come to the exhibit, you think. To try to find out more. About who he is. About himself.” Cath swears the world spins for a second, and she has to rest her head in her hands, professionalism be damned. This… this is a whole different ballgame.

“He may have already been,” Steve replies, moving to the edge of his chair, and it takes everything Cath has in her to not just press her face into her desk and give up for the day. “I haven’t been able to request any security camera footage to assess that situation. But I need--I need reassurance from you that the exhibit will respect and honor the service that Sergeant Barnes gave to this country.”  

And there it is. The _actual_ request. She feels a little hurt that it took him so long to ask, and a little hurt that he’s asking at all--as if she has no connection to the exhibit, as if she didn’t work _with_ him to ensure the exhibit would be as thorough, as respectful, as it possibly could be. ”Captain Rogers, with all due respect, museum exhibits are a lot slower than history.” He _knows_ this--she fielded she can’t even begin to count how many impatient calls from him while they worked on the last update to the exhibit. “I can promise you at this time that no changes will be made immediately, regardless of what comes to the public light about the Winter Soldier.” It’s not the promise he wants, exactly, but it’s the best she can give him right now, and the glint in his eyes tells her he understands. She _wants_ to interject, remind him that their duty is to fully explore the history, and that at some point the exhibit will have to be changed once again to reflect the wider picture, but for now--she can give him that much, for now.

“Thank you, Ms. Denall.” And suddenly, everything is back to formal, and the smile she catches on his lips is tired, bags visible under his eyes in the shadow of his tilted head. “Thank you.” He starts to rise, but Cath holds out an arm to stop him.

“Captain Rogers, if it’s not too much trouble…” He sinks back into the chair, and she tries to figure out how the hell to ask this question. “The copy is still going to say he--Sergeant Barnes--died. Is that… what happens when he sees that?”

Steve’s an old soldier, she realizes again as he relaxes against the chair. “I… don’t know,” he admits, and Cath regrets asking at all. It’s her exhibit just as much as it is his, and sometimes curators have to call the shots. Sometimes curators know better than the history they’re trying to preserve.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s fine. We’ll take care of it. And I will be sure to look into the audio issues with the exhibit--I’ll go over to the exhibit and check it out myself. I promise.” That’s part of her job--check the visitor surveys, make sure they’ve thought of everything--but there it is, a _solid_ promise that Steve can leave her office with at the end of the day. And that’s all he wanted when he walked into the building in the first place.

Instead of getting up, he nods again, and sits for a moment, his head turned, back to looking out the window. Cath watches him expectantly, wondering how much more he could possibly have to ask her, wondering how much more she could possibly promise him, but then he exhales heavily and rises from the seat, heading towards the door with a slight wince as the movement jars his arm. He pauses in the doorframe, caressing the wood of it with one hand.

“Thank you,” he repeats. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

He’s gone before she can come up with a response, which is good because she doesn’t even know where to start in her thanks. She watches the empty frame recover from his filling it, listens to his heavy footsteps retreat down the hall before being swallowed up by the sound of office work. She can hear the buzzing of the electric lights above her head, and of her computer, and the soft squeak of the fan in the next office over.

It’s a new day in the nation’s capital, and she needs to keep looking through visitor surveys. She made a promise to Steve Rogers, but there are still two and a half hours between now and her lunch break, and she has to make those, count too. Visitor surveys first, and then making sure her museum exhibit is welcoming to brainwashed operatives for former terrorist organizations. In these times of chaos, it’s always good to have your priorities in order


End file.
